


Lay blame at my door

by towardsmorning



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Community: sherlockbbc_fic, Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-02
Updated: 2012-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-30 12:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/towardsmorning/pseuds/towardsmorning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>(Prompt: When Sherlock comes back after the hiatus, everyone expects him to be furious with Sally Donovan (including her). But when Sherlock does come back, he just says "Why on earth would I be angry? The evidence was set up for me to look guilty. It just shows she was using her brain for once.")</i>
</p><p>"It's a good thing they'd never got on in an odd way. This would be far more awkward if they had love between them to be lost. Sally tells herself she'll simply have to grit her teeth and bear it, the inevitable pointed remarks and accusations. It's not as though she can really refute them."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay blame at my door

**Author's Note:**

> This was fun to write indeed. I have an odd fondness for Sally, so it was definitely fun to get inside her head. And as someone pointed out on the prompt thread, this is really a very Sherlock thing to do; in the first episode, he basically thinks John *ought* to think he's the killer.

The atmosphere is tense to say the least.

Sally's known he was back for as long as everyone else has, of course. It had spread 'round the Yard immediately, rumours giving way to proof in the way of somebody thinking to see if John had posted anything. The news had been taken with a weird sort of half-relieved, half-tense mood once the initial shock had worn off, nobody quite willing to verbalize anything. Relieved because over the past eighteen months more or less everybody had come to realise that Moriarty had fed them a crock of shit and left them feeling smug about it, tense because god knew how that was going to go down when he inevitably dropped in on a case.

(Although to be honest Sally's almost more worried about John. Sherlock had run off and pissed about for a while, and yeah, sure, it probably wasn't a walk in the park. But John had been through hell watching his friend kill himself and then be destroyed in the media, and John Watson in a bad mood is surprisingly unnerving. It's always the quiet ones.)

As for her own feelings, well, she won't lie and say she's not glad he's alive. Of course she is. She may not have liked the man, but she certainly didn't ever intend to have him throw himself off a building. And there had been guilt- once the shock of the whole situation had begun to wear off and she'd found herself thinking, _how hard would it be to fake that many cases really_ , the sinking feeling that she'd been played for a fool starting to appear... yes, Sally's glad he's alive.

But she really doesn't want to have to deal with it anyway.

It's a good thing they'd never got on in an odd way. This would be far more awkward if they had love between them to be lost. Sally tells herself she'll simply have to grit her teeth and bear it, the inevitable pointed remarks and accusations. It's not as though she can really refute them. Anderson is sympathetic (and has moved beyond 'pleased we didn't kill him' to 'angry he let us think we did'), and everyone else gives her a grim nod that seems to say, over and over, 'keep your chin up'. Lestrade looks as anxious as she does. Sally wonders if he spent a lot of time blaming himself too.

They arrive at the scene together and Sherlock's already there, striding around as though he never left. She catches sight of John stood a ways off, just watching him, not smiling but with the kind of awe on his face that says he thinks he's going to wake up any minute. After a second he meets her gaze and gives her a nod. She can't decipher what it means but it's better than outright hostility, so she nods back and leaves it at that for now. Maybe once she's spoken to Sherlock she'll apologise, maybe she won't.

"So," Sally opens with, stepping up to him as he prances around like Christmas has come early. Some things never change. Unfortunately.

"Hm? Oh. Hello, _dear_ Sally," he says, sarcasm as clipped as ever. She braces herself. "Was there something you wanted, beyond the usual task of me doing your job for you?"

The flash of irritation she feels is familiar. "You're looking well for a dead man, freak." Which isn't exactly true, because the man in front of her is thin enough that he looks like he's been cut to the bone and has a white tinge to match. She wonders, not for the first time, what he's actually been getting up to.

"Now that we've finished stating the obvious..." he moves off without looking at her, swish of his coat trailing behind him.

"What, that's it?"

He whirls back around, face impatient and as carved from stone as ever. "What?"

"Nothing at all, no-" perhaps she should just let it lie, but if they don't get this over and done with now Sally will just end up waiting for it every time she sees him. She's not a coward. She'll take whatever it is he plans to say to her and then get on with her life. But she refuses to dance around it, let it eat away at her and torture her until it's consuming her brain. Sally's mature enough to admit when she's done wrong, but she refuses to believe that she deserves _that_. "-nothing about the Moriarty case?"

Sherlock looks at her with those unnerving eyes of his, long and hard enough that she almost shouts at him to get on with it, and then raises his eyebrows, apparently coming to some conclusion. "Ah. I see."

"See?"

"You're expecting me to have some sort of emotional outburst over your part in my supposed 'death'," he says, and rolls his eyes. "Don't be ridiculous."

The only thing Sally can think to do is gawk at him. It's probably undignified and later she'll almost certainly feel embarrassed over letting him see her so wrong-footed, but right now she can't help it. He continues on without seeming to care.

"I don't see why you expect me to be angry, however. The evidence was set up for me to look guilty. That was the entire point of the game," and she can't help but twitch at the word choice, everything always _was_ a game to this man- "It just shows you managed to use your brain for once and manage your job without me."

Sally has absolutely no answer to that.

He waits to see if she'll say anything more for a moment, then moves off without another word. She's already forgotten as he goes to inspect some patch of soil or other that probably tells him what the victim had been doing three weeks ago or something ridiculous. Back to work. Business as usual. Never mind all that 'nearly died' business, much more important things to attend to.

 _Bastard,_ she thinks, and she's mildly horrified to realise that there isn't all that much vehemence behind it.


End file.
